


now you're beside me (and look how far we've come)

by queenfanfiction



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, blacked-out het sex ftw!, brb taking a trip down heterosexual lane, fillin' in the blanks, no really, post-belgravia, sherlock and irene love each other for their minds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenfanfiction/pseuds/queenfanfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes Irene a trip through the continent to accept that, while she may be the only woman to have beaten Sherlock Holmes, he is still the only man to have ever made her beg. But maybe this isn't such a bad thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now you're beside me (and look how far we've come)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the lyrics of "[So Close](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qga4SJ-3MQ)" (sung here by John Barrowman and Jodie Prenger) from the movie "[Enchanted (2007)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted_\(film\))." Beta'ed by the awesome Oraien. HEART YOU, SWEETIE. <3
> 
> **ETA (18Jan2016):** ...aaand announcing a translation! Into [RUSSIAN](https://ficbook.net/readfic/3961663). Many thanks, Lena Pavlova!

She can't stay in London. Even if there hadn't been a price on her head (from either side, because Irene has spent her life making enemies, and sometimes she wonders which bounty for her capture is valued higher), she can't bear to stay for long in the place where she came so close to winning and instead lost everything she'd ever worked for.

Besides, she can't stand the thought of skulking about in the same bustling city as _him_ a minute longer than she has to. Irene knows (though she'd be a fool to say it out loud) that Sherlock had been right, after all: her one fatal lapse of judgment would never have happened had she been playing against any other man (or woman, for that matter). If she is truly honest with herself, it's almost like she had _wanted_ him to ruin her—but maybe that's pushing it a little far.

Nevertheless, while she may have been the only woman to have beaten him (as far as she knows), Sherlock bloody Holmes is officially the only man to have ever made Irene beg for anything in her life—and while she can't exactly blame him, she's certainly not about to forgive herself for it, either.

So she leaves (she wouldn't call it 'fleeing,' though others might, but she has too much of her shattered dignity left to admit defeat even in this endgame), taking a train to the Continent with nothing more than a wheelie full of old clothes and a handbag stuffed with new names and identification. She has enough bank accounts scattered across Eurasia to last her for however long it takes for her shame or her luck to leave her.

(At this point, Irene honestly doesn't give a damn which of them goes first.)

~

She spends the first night in Paris, basking on the balcony of her hotel room on the twenty-sixth floor in the night-glow of the Eiffel Tower. She's stayed in this hotel plenty of times before for business trips (or privileged French house-calls, as the case would be); and when Irene rang for dinner, the concierge had sent up two bottles of good wine with their compliments.

Irene empties them by herself, glass by glass, all the while watching the tiny, insignificant people still on the streets below. A few of them wander singly, but the rest move about in pairs or clusters of three. Still, all the people in the world wouldn't be enough to make Irene forget that moment when he'd showed her the phone: his expression had been as unflinching as the password now revealed on its screen, but the accusatory betrayal in his eyes had been as bright as when she'd pushed past him inside that plane of the dead.

This isn't the first time she's been in the city of lovers, not the first time by far, but it's the first time that Irene has ever felt so alone.

On a whim, Irene digs her mobile out from the bottom of her handbag. It takes her several tries to fix all her drunken typos, but finally she's composed a message to be proud of. _The Eiffel Tower is lovely; better than Coventry, I'd imagine. If you make the last train, I might even save you dinner._

She falls asleep before she manages to send the text; and when she wakes up bleary-eyed the next morning, her uncharged mobile is dead and the message is lost.

(But, really, it's probably better that way.)

~

Jim Moriarty had few enough qualms to begin with, Irene knew that the moment she met him, and he had even fewer when it came to dumping his clients the moment they became more burden than asset. (No one had any proof about the death of General Shan, but among Irene's circle it had been more than an open secret that it hadn't been Sherlock Holmes who had killed her.) So she supposes she shouldn't have been surprised when, on her second morning in Berlin, she receives a text from Jim that is only one sentence long.

_It's been fun my dear Ms Adler, but all good things must come to an end._

She doesn't bother replying, but instead checks out of her posh hotel and rents out a badly-furnished room in a worse neighborhood under one of her many different aliases. She isn't stupid, after all (nor is she foolishly sentimental, despite all evidence to the contrary); but even though she always knew that it couldn't end in any other way but this, the reality of it still smarts, a metaphorical slap to the face that makes her mouth physically tingle from the brute coldness of it.

She doesn't bother replying, but she does compose another text to a different number. _Berlin's here, wish you were boring._

She hesitates for a moment with the cursor on SEND, then flicks to SAVE DRAFT.

(Maybe some other time.)

~

_Visited the house where Mozart grew up,_ Irene writes from a café in Salzburg. _Not impressed, but I've always been a Puccini girl. Expect you'd disagree. Maybe you should try and convince me over dinner sometime._

_Have you ever been to Budapest?_ she asks a few days later. _Just sang in the opera house, it sounded amazing. I sing opera for fun, did you know? Never really got around to talking about ourselves much, did we? Bet your violin would sound fantastic onstage._

It isn't until she leaves the wilderness of the Romanian countryside for the civilization of Bucharest that she is finally able to reboot her battery-drained phone long enough to compose another message. _I've decided you must be part-gypsy,_ she concludes. _Passed one fiddling on the street, all curls and cheekbones. Distant relation?_

_"Sofia" is Greek for "wisdom,"_ she texts on her last night in Bulgaria. _Would it be wise to admit I was wrong? That I was lying, always lying? Because I wasn't just playing the game, Sherlock. But you already know that, don't you?_

(Discard, discard, discard, disca— _save._ )

~

She notices that she is being followed a day before she leaves Istanbul.

It isn't so much noticing as sensing, a feeling that something other than her shadow has been trailing her through the busy open-air market where she purchases her daily meal. When she turns around, the crowd of other shoppers behind her is too thick to pick out anyone specific; so she walks another few hundred metres until the feeling grows strong again, then casually glances over her shoulder for a second look.

There. A distinctive Arabic man's headdress, white linen fluttering in the breeze. Irene veers off to the right, pretending to examine a street vendor's goods, and the man does the same two stalls away.

"Lovely jewels for a lovely lady?" offers Irene's vendor in heavily-accented English, holding out a turquoise-and-sapphire bracelet for her inspection. Irene smiles, but shakes her head and moves on. The man immediately loses interest in his own vendor and wanders after her. When Irene speeds her pace to cross the street, he matches her; and when she slows, he becomes suddenly fascinated by the blue sky above them.

_Shit._

Irene ducks into a small shop on her left, a clothing boutique that showcases traditional Islamic wear for women. Five minutes later, she hobbles back out with the limp of an old woman bent by age and arthritis, a drab gray hijab pulled tightly about her face. She brushes past the Arab on her way out the door; and when she mumbles a broken apology in Arabic, he replies with a curt nod and lets her go without a second look, his own gaze still fixed on the entry of the shop that she had just left.

The escape is successful, albeit still far too close for comfort. Irene doesn't know who sent the man to trace her, but she doesn't stay to find out. She's in such a rush to leave (stowing away in the cargo hold of a supply truck, head bowed and hands clenched in the darkness while everything bounces and rattles around her) that she doesn't even think of texting Sherlock until she's well past the southern Turkish-Syrian border.

(Not that it matters much, anyway, because she's already decided that the only time she will ever contact him again in this world would be her last.)

~

She doesn't breathe easier until she's in Riyadh, where she knows she has friends in high places—but, as it turns out, here she also has enemies in higher ones.

It happens as she's huddling beneath the privacy of her burqa, a disguise that has served her well in the past several days, shuffling down the side street that will take her to the flat of an old friend. Ironically, it is the same friend that had given her Moriarty's name to begin with. She'd known Sebastian Moran—or rather, had known what he liked—for years, long before he left the Royal Armed Forces to sign up with Blackwater as their sharpest-shooting mercenary in recent history; and when she'd emailed him for help with too much information and not enough ways to make use of it, he'd been only too happy to offer advice gained from his own personal experience: namely, if Jim couldn't come up with something, then Irene might as well chuck the damn phone because there was no one else in the world clever enough to help her.

It's not like Irene isn't on her guard, because she hadn't really dropped it in the first place since leaving Turkey, but it still comes as a surprise when a man steps out from the shadows and grabs her by the right wrist. He is masked, only his dark eyes and thin lips visible, so Irene can only guess at his gender from the harsh strength in his hands and the brusque depth of his voice as he tells her (his English made deceptively lyrical by an Arabic lilt), "If you do not come quietly, I will kill you on this spot. Understand me?"

_Actually, I prefer to scream when I come,_ Irene wants to say, but then the man twists her wrist with such force that the pain makes her gasp instead. "Why don't you kill me, then?" she asks, trying to hide the shaking in her voice with a challenging tone.

The man is not fooled. His lips quirk into a sneer, made the more menacing by the fact that Irene can see nothing else of his face. "Because, Miss Adler," he says, letting the last syllable of her name roll on his tongue before spitting it at her feet, "the reward I will get for your capture is much higher if you are alive than if you are dead. But!" With his other hand, he shows her the revolver that he has palmed from his waist before shoving the muzzle against her side, and his sneer grows even wider. "Even if I shoot you, as long as you are still breathing, my reward will be the same. So. Shall we move?"

Irene doesn't, but before she can think of the best way to fight back without getting herself killed, there is the sound of a faint _pop,_ as if someone had fired a starter's pistol from a mile away. At first, she assumes that her captor had pulled the trigger, that he had been smart enough to use a silencer so as not to alert the locals; but then she sees his eyes go wide and blank, a beat before he lets the gun fall to the ground (skidding from them with puffs of sand), and two beats before he crumples, with the soft sigh of his soul slipping away from one world and into the next.

Irene looks up, away from the dark-red blood slowly collecting in puddles around her captor's body (shot in the back, bullet must have lodged in him since it certainly didn't come out the other side to hit her, he probably died almost instantly though God knows Irene wishes he'd died sooner but slower) and towards the nearest rooftops and windows where the sniper must have been standing in order to deliver such a well-placed kill shot. But there is no one; nothing moves, not even a flutter of color or cloth to show that someone had been there a moment before. It's almost like the whole thing never happened—but it had, and Irene has the dead man at her feet to prove it.

There is only one person Irene knows who would be able to execute (ha, _execute_ ) such a maneouvre with the precision required; but that idea is struck through once she finally arrives at Sebastian's flat three blocks away and finds him still in his dressing gown, hair tousled and eyes swollen red from what seems to be a fairly-extensive hangover. When she explains what happened, he reacts with visible shock and no less concern for her well-being.

"You'd best get out tonight," he tells her, more serious than she has ever heard him in all the years they've known each other. "If they know you're here, I won't even be able to help you for long. I can manage you safe passage past the border checkpoints, but not much more than that." He hesitates, then grabs a pad and pen from his desk, scribbling an address before ripping off the sheet and passing it to Irene. "If your luck holds, make for my safe house in Calcutta," he says, rubbing his unshaven chin in a nervous gesture. "I'll bet on a tiger that no one can target you if you get there."

Irene thanks him and accepts the money he gives her for travel expenses (including bribing the customs officials, though really that's just part of the travel); but she can't help but wonder who her mysterious savior, that unseen sniper, had been aiming for in the first place—because, Irene realises with a sick jolt, she had been standing so close to the dead man that it would have been more than easy to make a mistake.

("Don't think," Sebastian says before she leaves, "just run," and it is the best advice Irene has had in a long while.)

~

Her luck, contrary to Sebastian's expectations and Irene's hopes, does not hold out.

She makes it out of Saudi Arabia and into Iraq without much trouble, but she hits the metaphorical IED en route to the Iranian border. Someone recognises her in Basra, somehow, and then there is a period of hours or days where Irene remembers nothing, save for waking up with a cloth bag over her head and handcuffs on her wrists, jostling over badly-paved roads in the back of a truck. When she shifts her weight to test her bonds, she is stopped by the unmistakable chill of cold gunmetal pressing against her bare throat. She wants to say something, anything, but the gun prevents her from making any sound other than choking gasps; and so she remains silent for the rest of the trip, a drive of what feels like months but is probably only a day and a half, a ride that carries her out of Iraq and through Iran and out to the coast of Pakistan.

_It won't be long now,_ Irene thinks, her fingers itching for freedom and the feel of a smooth keyboard, and then, _I wish it didn't have to end like this,_ and finally, before the end and after she's given up on getting out of this alive, _I'm sorry._

But they had taken away her phone, and she doesn't get it back until her execution when someone is kind enough to grant her one last request while she kneels, at swordpoint, in the sand. When she finally types out the three words she has been visualising in her head since the day they captured her, she chooses each letter slow enough to let her live her miserable, empty life for just another heartbeat longer; when she hits SEND, the pain is sharper than any sword cutting through her neck, almost as if Irene had cued the drop of the blade with that final press of the button.

_Goodbye Mr Holmes_

Irene closes her eyes, and waits.

(For a moment, she wonders what he will think when he gets the message—but she doesn't wonder for long because, in her mind and her heart, she is already dead.)

~

She never thought she'd live long enough to find out, but apparently the time it takes for a text message to leave one British phone in Karachi, bounce to a Vodafone satellite halfway across the world, and be received by a second British phone in the pockets of the man ready to cut off her head directly behind her, is exactly two-and-a-half heartbeats.

And then she looks at her executioner, sees those brilliant eyes that have never missed a thing, and for the first time in a long time, Irene is truly _alive._

(As she flees, she takes the opportunity to knock out one of her captors, who had been taking aim at Sherlock's back while the latter was occupied with chopping through the rest of the former's comrades; and Irene tells herself that the heady rush of joy she feels is from the excitement of the chase and not from anything else at all.)

~

Irene takes a room in the seediest hostel she can find, under a name she makes up on the spot and with an even-worse fake accent ("Is Moriarty a common name in Canada?" the man behind the desk asks her as he watches her sign.

Irene only smiles and says, " _Oui._ "); but when she pushes through the unlocked door of her room, he is already inside, waiting for her.

"How did you know—" she begins, but his finger is on her lips, and she gladly falls silent.

"I followed you," Sherlock says. He has long ditched the robes of the religious executioner and had hurriedly cleaned himself up to hide the traces; but there is still the faintest streak of blood on the underside of his jaw that Irene wants to smear away, to finger it as lovingly as she would a whiplash of her own making. However, his other hand is gripping her arm, and she is afraid to move lest he should decide to let her go.

"Not just here," he amends after a beat. "I've been tracking you since you left London." His hand slides down her forearm, ticking off the countries she's visited with a firm pressure for each one. "France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. Everywhere you went, I was always behind you. You nearly caught me out three times, and I had to watch to keep my distance, especially after they found you, and I couldn't do anything to stop them from taking you without destroying my cover, but—" His fingers tighten convulsively around the base of her wrist, and Irene giddily hopes that it will leave a bruise. "I've not had you out of my sight for more than a half-day since we left Europe."

Irene thinks back, remembers the gypsy violinist, the Arab who'd followed her through the streets of Istanbul, the mysterious sniper in Riyadh; then she takes his hand, the one that is on her mouth, and gently moves it until both their hands are joined at the folds of her unbuttoned blouse. "Yes," she says, "but how did you know?"

His gaze is sharp enough to leave raised welts on her skin, but warm enough to make the stinging worth it. "Because you said you wouldn't last six months without protection. I wanted to see how close your estimate would be." His upper lip curls, teeth shining in the dim light of their room in a feral grin. "To be honest, I thought you would last much longer. Clearly I gave you too much credit."

Irene can't hold back a breathy laugh. He could call her an imbecile for all she cared, and still it wouldn't be enough to break the euphoria rushing through her—because she would still be able to hear the words underneath his voice telling her, _I would never let you come to harm._

"Yes, but—" She leans forward, a damp strand of her hair barely brushing his cheek. "How did you _know?_ "

His smile softens, a beat before the rest of his body follows. "Because," Sherlock murmurs, bending close enough until his mouth is just a breath away from her throat, her pulse, her very life that he had saved, "I lost."

(Much later, just before the sun rises and long after she has dressed, Irene slips her ring off her hand and, leaning over Sherlock's sprawled and sleeping form, presses the diamond into his half-open palm. "No, love," she whispers in his ear, then gently kisses his temple. "You didn't lose. We _won._ "

In his sleep, Sherlock smiles; and this time, when Irene leaves him, she isn't afraid to look back.)

~

_When Sherlock enters 221B, John looks up from his laptop at their breakfast table in surprise. "Oh," he says. "You're back."_

_"Brilliant observation, John," says Sherlock dryly, before stalking into the kitchen towards his bedroom._

_But he is only half of the way there when John calls, "So I guess this means you finished your case, right?"_

_Sherlock pauses in mid-step, and his hand slowly drifts inside his coat where John cannot see him. "Yes," he acknowledges, "I did."_

_"How did it go?"_

_For a long moment, Sherlock doesn't answer, still fingering Irene's ring in the depths of his inner coat pocket. Finally, he shrugs and (as casually as he can manage) says, "As well as could be expected."_


End file.
